Benjamin Britten’s composition War Requiem is a protest and admonition, pleading for peace and against any form of inhumanity. Premiered in 1962 in commemoration of Nazi German air raids on the British city of Coventry, it is considered one of the most impressive and most moving musical works of reconciliation to this day. Its compositional structure has been described as an ‘ingenious inspiration’: the Latin words of the Christian requiem are interlaced with Wilfred Owen’s poems about ‘the pity of war’. The British poet died a fortnight before the end of the First World War.